You can't have sharks with laser beams on their heads. It's 1858. Sharks haven't been invented yet.

[albadger]

Just back from seeing Django Unchained, Quentin Tarantino answering the question, what do you do after making a masterpiece but you're not really a master, you just lucked out? And the answer, weirdly, does not involve giant apes climbing skyscrapers this time.

Maybe I'm too jaded. Maybe I'm so old movie violence neither repels me nor intrigues me. Maybe I don't need people who get shot in the head to expel gallons of fake blood in gravity-defying directions for me to think, if I got shot in the head it wouldn't look like that. And, yeah, I know we're not supposed to wonder about dynamite in 1858 when it was invented in 1867, or wonder exactly what part of Mississippi looks that much like Wyoming, or why the bad guys don't just hammer the good guy's skull in when they have a perfect chance instead of sending him off with a henchman and closing the door so they can't see the good guy make his escape. Which at least Austin Powers was funny about... And, yes, this has gotten raved about by critics. But still.

For me, uninvolving from beginning to end. Cristoph Walz is wonderful, and nearly kept my attention, but he's playing second fiddle to a flat, dull lead (perhaps meant that way, since the movies this is based on tended to have flat, dull leading men). The rest... meh... though I wouldn't be surprised if in 40 years, some young hotshot makes a movie based entirely on his youthful watching of Django Unchained, which would be a movie about a movie about cheap, bad movies that were imitations of earlier cheap, bad movies. And then, someday, somebody would make an homage to that.

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Second review -- of MoviePass! MoviePass promises unlimited movie viewing in theaters for a flat fee. Well, a little limited; you can only see one movie one time, and only one movie a day, but still, that's up to 31 movies a month! Score! So I enrolled & installed the app on my phone. They sent me a card. Very simple, just register the card with the iphone app, select the movie on your app (you have to be within 100 yards of the theater), then swipe the card at the automated kiosk & you're in! I got my card and turned on the app. "Type in the last 4 digits of the card to register it," says the app. I do so. The app turns the entire screen a light gray and then does nothing. Ever. Reboot and repeat. I ended up using a pass I got at CostCo last year. MoviePass, you haven't heard the end of this!

Comments

[maxauburn.livejournal.com]

I watched PEARL HARBOR, starring Ben Affleck.

The movie is about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, an American Naval base in Hawaii.

There, in an otherwise mostly correct movie taking place in 1941 was a 1946 Ford.

:P

[albadger.livejournal.com]

You're good -- I would not have caught that! Nor would I be caught watching a Michael Bay movie. ;)

But the anachronisms in Django I think weren't the result of laziness, like the one in Pearl Harbor -- they were deliberate, like the use of Wyoming to stand in for the Deep South. Brechtian distancing devices, meta-text, yammer blah blah. Works for some people. For me, just made it that much more obvious that the movie was about nothing, and meant nothing.

[mrdreamjeans.livejournal.com]

I've never felt compelled to see any Tarentino movie. I certainly won't be seeing this one. I abhor gory, gratuitous violence and the subject matter simply isn't of interest to me. I don't understand why this guy gets to direct movies!

[albadger.livejournal.com]

Short answer -- he gets to keep making them because they make money.

But I actually would recommend 2 of his films: Jackie Brown, which is the only time he's adapted material instead of assembling purees of material; and Inglourious Basterds, which for a variety of reasons ended up rather profound. Though for Basterds, which is divided by title cards into 5 sections, I would seriously recommend skipping section 2 entirely. It's a better movie that way.

[dhpbear.livejournal.com]

Yeah, but are they frickin' laser beams? :)

Yes. Yes, they are.

[albadger.livejournal.com]

But, unfortunately, LiveJournal seems to have a 100-character limit on title lines.

[progbear.livejournal.com]

How about the dogs with bees in their mouths and when they bark they shoot bees at you?

Your review succinctly explains what irks me about Tarantino’s films. In the end, they don’t really say anything apart from “I think this would be cool.” In fact, I’m rapidly sensing a pattern with his films:

1. Start with a grindhouse-era genre he watched a ton of back when he was a video store employee.
2. Mate it to an obvious, provocative historical event, whatever will net the most controversy, whether or not it makes any sense.
3. Throw in whatever music is currently on his iTunes playlist, whether or not it makes any sense.

My prediction for his next feature film: a movie “inspired by” the Manson family (names not changed for maximum eye-rolling) in the style of a rape-revenge thriller (think I Spit on Your Grave), starring Uma Thurman as Sharon Tate, who at one point in the film has one of her forearms surgically replaced with a machine gun. Featuring gangsta rap and incidental music from 80s Lucio Fulci films on the soundtrack.

Sorry about your Movie Pass experience. That sounds sucky. And yet, sadly typical of lots of modern technology.

---

Oh, and I posted about your New Years adventure, albeit in passing, on my LJ.

[albadger.livejournal.com]

Thinking about Sharon Tate, I think it would be more fun if Tarantino made his own mock-up of a Harold Robbins/Jacqueline Susann bitch-slap soap opera.

[benpanced.livejournal.com]

But it would have to be really, really, really Amazingly Stupendously GOOD. I've tried watching Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill, Vol. 1, and his gratuitous overuse of f-bombs really put me off his work because it's nothing more than sloppy writing. The characters have these long, boring, rather pointless exchanges (see the exchange about Big Macs in France in Pulp Fiction) that really don't have anything to do with anything. And the pop culture movie in-jokes just have me screaming at the screen, "WE GET IT! YOU'RE A FILM GEEK! YOU LOVE THE TRASHY GRINDHOUSE MOVIES OF THE 60'S AND 70'S! NOW STOP PROVING IT EVERY TIME YOU TURN AROUND!" That said, his potboiler homage/send-up would pique my curiosity but given the track record, I'd have to think long and hard before seeing it.

(When Bravo was showing his movies a couple years back, every single time Pulp Fiction was on, I'd be flipping channels and that goddamned dance contest scene was playing. Every. Single. Time. I always would land on it just as Travolta and Thurman had just gotten up onto the dance floor and the music was starting or Travolta was doing the V over the eyes thing. For like six weeks in a row.)

[albadger.livejournal.com]

I have to say here -- I find Travolta more repulsive and creepy than any other actor alive or dead (sorry, John Wayne!). I'm not allowed to talk about that at my brother's house, because my sister-in-law loves Travolta and I'm not allowed to say a bad thing about him.

Well, NOW, I could probably get away with saying bad things about Travolta's face lift.

[progbear.livejournal.com]

He better not. That’s my idea, dammit!

Besides, that movie already exists. It’s called Valley of the Dolls.

[albadger.livejournal.com]

Ya know what? If Beyond the Valley of the Dolls had never been released, had just sat on a shelf for 42 years, and then somebody today fished it out and slapped Tarantino's name on it and released it... nobody would question it. Nobody. It's a Tarantino film.

Which means that Quentin Tarantino is actually not a necessary ingredient for a Tarantino film, I guess.

And why, when I'm trying to type his full name, do I always end up with "Question Tarantino"? That's not even autocorrect. That's me.